GoRuCo, a one-day, single-track event in New York City dedicated to everything Ruby, is now accepting proposal papers. This conference will be held on Saturday, April 26th in the Manhattan campus of Pace University, our hosts for the day.

It will be a technical conference aimed at highly motivated programmers interested in all things Ruby. You’ll spend the day among Rubyists, Rails developers, and language enthusiasts in New York City, home of Silicon Alley.

We will select five speakers to give one hour talks, and invite all interested speakers to submit a proposal. Our speakers will receive:

Free attendance to the event

A $600 honorarium

A $600 travel reimbursement if you live outside of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut

We are reserving at least two slots for speakers from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, so if you live in the tri-state area we strongly urge you to submit a proposal.

Talks should be about 50 minutes long, including time for questions and discussion. A good proposal paper will include:

A explanation or outline of your talk.

A short biographical statement about you and your involvement in the Ruby community.

Your state of residence.

Your proposal does not need to be long, but it should give us the information necessary to evaluate your talk.

All proposals must specify exactly who will be presenting. For example, we will not accept proposals from companies unless they specify who will be presenting on behalf of the company. Presentations may be given by more than one person, but multiple speakers will split the honorarium and travel reimbursement.

Please send all papers to papers@goruco.com by 11:59 PM EST on January 31st, 2008. You should receive confirmation that we have received your
proposal within 48 hours of submitting it.

If you have any questions about the proposal process or other conference related questions, please email info@goruco.com. More information on the
conference itself to come. Stay tuned to this website or subscribe to the RSS feed for updates.

Yeah, well, that took way too long: Our six talks from April are now online. We’ve put them on Travelistic for now because that allows us to control the quality of the encoding (not a trivial consideration when a lot of the video is small text on a screen). Here they are:

At GoRuCo, I ended up talking with a bunch of different people about learning and introducing Scrum. I mentioned that Jeff Sutherland would be in New York in September teaching a ScrumMaster course. Jeff started the first Scrum at Easel Corporation in 1993 and his company, PatientKeeper, is always experimenting and discovering more about Scrum and agile software development.

I emailed Jeff after the conference and he and the organizers of the September 5th-6th NYC CSM training agreed to extend a 10% discount to GoRuCo attendees. Details on the training are here. For details on the discount, email me at luke AT lukemelia.com.

Disclosure: Neither GoRuCo nor I make a dime on this. The more people who know and practice Scrum and Agile, the better off we all will be.

GoRuCo 2007 is over. 120 attendees, 6 speakers (plus a bunch of lightning talks), and an afterparty that closed out the bar … all the organizers are pretty wiped out, but happy we got to host everyone.

Bryan and jpreardon have some early livebloggage going on, and further links should go into del.icio.us tagged goruco2007. Also, we’ve got photos up on Flickr already. Just remember, kids: What happens at GoRuCo stays at GoRuCo. No, just kidding. Well, halfway kidding.

As for the future, we’ll see. We’re all interested in keeping this going, but as to what shape future conferences will take, time will tell. But we’ve definitely got more planned. Watch this space.

Gotham Ruby Conference isn’t a political organization, but we still feel the need to be a responsible one—not just to our speakers and our attendees, but to our community, both locally and globally. Of course, every organization is going to define its responsibilities differently, and in any case there’s only so much a fledging regional tech conference can do. But in our case, we’ve decided to do something about the issue of climate change, and particularly about our own contribution to the problem. So I’m happy to announce that we have purchased carbon offsets for GoRuCo 2007 through climatefriendly.org.

I believe this makes us the first Ruby or Rails conference to address carbon emissions, but we’ve got plenty of company in the broader technology industry. Most notably, Yahoo! just announced they’re going carbon-neutral. Hopefully, the announcements will keep coming.

I’m happy we’ve decided to take on this issue, not just because I personally believe in the cause but also because it’s a great expression of who we are as NYC Rubyists. The local Rubyists I’ve met in the past few years are people who are actively engaged not just with the world of code, but also with their broader communities. There are plenty of issues that a bunch of open source programmers are likely to be concerned about. But global warming is an issue that equally affects the people we’re connected to—whether those people are gallery owners, construction workers, or financial analysts.

Admittedly, our methodology is sloppy. For an organization of our size, hiring the expertise to allow yourself to claim to be carbon-neutral isn’t economical, which is why we only call ourselves carbon-offsetting. We sent out a survey a few weeks ago asking where people were coming from, and their mode of transportation: I extrapolated from those results, and it’s easy to imagine all the ways statistical error can sneak in.

We’re also aware of issues in the carbon offsets market. The science, regulation, and implementation of carbon offsetting is new and may change, and it’s possible that the efforts we fund may end up being less effective than we had hoped. In the meantime, we paid more than $800 USD to offset 45 tons of carbon emissions through climatefriendly.org, an Australian organization affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund. They fund Gold Standard-accredited clean energy projects in Australia, so we feel reasonably secure that our donation is going to effective work.

This is far from a perfect solution, but it’s a start. And sometimes you have to act even when the way forward is not perfectly clear. We look forward to a future (not very far away, at this rate) when the attention paid to climate change is so intense that the best solutions will rise to the top through vigorous research and public debate. And whatever those solutions may be, we are looking forward to playing our very small part.

Just incase folks have tried to use the wiki and run into issues with it asking for username and password, any login credentials will work. If the account does not exist, it’ll automatically create one and you can keep using it.

I mention this because the Lightning Talks and Activities pages still look a little weak, and with the conference around the corner, I’m hoping these start to fill up!

The GoRuCo afterparty, hosted by Indaba Music, will run from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. at the Musical Box in the East Village. Every conference attendee will receive four drink tickets. This isn’t a closed space, and we’ll be partying alongside New Yorkers who know nothing of us and of Ruby; that’s the sort of social frisson you go for in New York City. It’s like we’re Andy Warhol, only with more laptops and less drag queens.

For those of you who don’t know if staying up until 4 a.m. is possible, all we have to say is that there’s nothing shameful about a disco nap. And if you weren’t able to score a conference ticket, but would still like to hang around on Saturday night, come on down! The more the merrier. Heck, after using a few of these tickets we won’t be able to tell who was at the conference anyway.

Of course, some of you may not know where the Google NYC office is, so go to the venue page to check it out. As is to be expected, Google’s space is quite remarkable, and we’re all psyched that they’re helping us out by hosting GoRuCo.

One thing to note: As with many other Manhattan office buildings, the security at Google’s building requires a photo ID for entry, so make sure to bring yours to get in. See you in four days!

To accommodate one of our speakers, we’ve shuffled our schedule a bit: Check out the agenda if you want to know exactly who goes on when. No speakers have been added or deleted, just moved around a bit.